Nerdvana

I read an interesting article over at Fastcompany that very nicely sums up what I’ve been saying for some time about the notion of “screwing off at work.”. In nearly every job I’ve had it’s been very much a “nose to the grindstone” type situation. You are at work to work. I agree with that, however most of my knowledge and ability to find creative solutions to problems comes from the little bit of digging around I do between productive times.

Now (most) video watching and funny pictures aside, when I’ve hit a creative lull or am fighting through a particularly difficult problem I’ll find myself almost involuntarily drifting off to my news reader. I’ll find three or four different articles that interest me and skim most of them. If something particularly interesting stands out I’ll read the whole thing. It’s usually about 5 to 10 minutes of time. The average “smoke break” for some employees. Sometimes, not always, I’ll find something related to the issue at hand or some other issue that’s on the back burner, or a solution to someone else’s problem I remember hearing about in a meeting. I’ll bookmark it and come back to it either on my lunch hour or after hours or pass it off to the appropriate person and then move back to doing my work.

The Fastcompany article discusses this very thing. It mostly talks about how it relates to twittering at work but the same thing applies. “Microsharing” as they call it relates to “microblogging” or “twittering” both very social activities. But I believe it goes both ways. The act of reading micro blogs or twittering is also “Microsharing” because social knowledge is a two way street. As they state in the article “Knowledge is fundamentally social.”. This is very true in this day and age. With all of the facebook, and the twitters and the other social networks of the world, the knowledge bases and the user group lists have been condensed down to throwing out a question to your collective network and having it answered. ChaCha is another example of this. They’ve built a huge network of people to answer questions. You text your question to a number and within minutes you have an answer. Literally any subject is dealt with. With blogging and social media, information is read, rehashed, repackaged for a particular audience and reported at record speed.

In the act of writing this post I have taken something I’ve picked up along in my travels and repackaged it for my readers. This is “Social Knowledge”. As the article mentions, “What are you doing?” has given way to “What have you learned today other people should know about”. The free exchange of information on the internet is alive and well if you know where to look, and if you have the freedom to spend a few minutes daily to digest it. This isn’t to say you should be reading the news / browsing the internet a majority of time at work, but sometimes a little brain candy can go a long way to give you the extra mental energy you need to tackle the toughest of problems.